Social media and content marketing trends shift constantly, particularly in the coaching and solopreneur arena. Perhaps you’ve noticed this one yourself. The personal struggles, challenges, and vulnerabilities are no longer hidden behind a perfect veneer and instead shared openly as part of one’s brand. Or at least, that’s what many marketers will advise is “content that’s good for business”. By sharing personal experiences about mental health, chronic illnesses, or other life challenges, many coaches and soloprenuers have helped de-stigmatise and lessen shame around certain topics, allowing audiences to feel less alone and create sought-after community engagement.
However, I’m seeing more and more explicit vulnerability-marketing that is disconnected from the actual services being offered.
That’s an important distinction in what I’m speaking to. If you specialise in helping others through something you’ve overcome, it makes sense to share your experience. But if someone is still amid healing, or their issues are unrelated to their professional offerings, it’s worth questioning the value and appropriateness of publicising such information.
I’ve been exploring this phenomenon, and I’ve got questions.
Can we claim to be operating from an empowered state and positioning ourselves as empowering others if we depend endlessly on external systems and interventions? Where one becomes over-identified with a diagnosis rather than personal growth and healthy coping strategies. Especially when the emphasis is on artificial symptom management (western medicine I’m looking at you) over investigating and addressing the underlying factors with holistic health approaches.
This empowerment paradox I see has emerged from the tension between sharing for awareness (as part of the marketing strategy) and inadvertently promoting victimhood — and keeping people in it without them realising. Coaches and solopreneurs who consistently emphasise personal challenges or health conditions in their narrative alienate a segment of their audience and position themselves as victims unintentionally when repeating the message. Conversely, plenty of people will buy from them because they can relate.
This trend echoes themes explored in one of my favourite books: The Authenticity Hoax by Andrew Potter. In 2010, he explored how our modern obsession with authenticity was creating the very problems it intended to solve. A trend that has now intensified in the coach and influencer culture era we’re in. In chapters aptly named The Perils of Transparency and Vote For Me, I’m Authentic, Potter examined how authenticity was co-opted by marketers, turning it into just another consumer good, and how the pursuit of authenticity has led us to performative behaviour. Potter also points out that the quest to appear authentic can lead to a romanticisation of the past or “simpler” ways of living (trad wife, anyone?) I see the parallel in how personal brands are exalting their struggles or conditions, glorifying these states, and many their unwitting codependency with the medical industrial complex. They have not healed. They have not victoriously overcome. Instead, they infuse their brand identity with inadvertent victimhood. As audiences cheer this perceived bravery, it becomes harder to let go.
Self-fulfilling prophecies and the profitable victimhood economy
Systems of power benefit from a population that sees itself as victims or patients rather than empowered individuals. Without people dependent on medication, bound by limiting beliefs, and living in low vibrations, many aspects of our current health, pharmaceutical, and self-help industries that undermine our innate capacity for resilience and self-healing would fall away fast. I can see the potential for the erosion of credibility. At least for me personally, I’m not taking advice from someone on anything while they’re stuck in this state.
While I believe we don’t owe audiences anything and what people think of us is none of our business – it is supposed to be our business we’re marketing. Potential clients want to work with confident, solution and results focused people, knowledgeable in their expertise, not those who are besieged by their personal malaises. While it’s inspirational to share, “I do this work in spite of….” audiences may see the business as a therapy page rather than a professional service. When everyone is doing it, combined with the abundant trauma we see everywhere online, compassion fatigue sets in, causing brand disengagement and amnesia. Sometimes I don’t recall what a person does anymore because their personal story has become so centralised.
This is not to diminish the genuine struggles people experience. But countless personal brands I come across seem to sustain themselves on victim narratives. When vulnerability becomes a content pillar, we’re dwelling in disempowered frequencies, then projecting that out to the world. And that’s not good for business — or the broader culture — long term.
Social media oversharing and identity theft
As an aside, and worth a newsletter piece of its own, cyber criminals also glean social media to collect more info for data profiles to help them commit identity fraud. For now, you can understand more about it in the blogs I’m writing for my client Sapher — an Australian cybersecurity company. Their first product is a browser extension that stops phishing and malware scams, and fake websites in real time before they fool you. Try it free for 30 days.
